Two Cheeks Of The Same Arse

Tweet "I don't suppose that Republican Presidents have any special love for Palestine, but there are other political realities that generally make them less susceptible to a foreign policy of Israel-right-or-wrong. Firstly, they know what is good for business; and the fact is that the business of the Middle East is oil and that is not found on the Israeli side of the Arab-Israeli equation. Secondly, they have enjoyed a certain freedom of action over the years vis-a-vis Israel simply because they haven't had to worry about alienating the Jewish-American voter or political contributor: Fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway, as James Baker III summed it up so delicately. I think that's why the major instances when this country actually said "no" to Israel have come from Republican Presidents: from Eisenhower's forcing Israel to relinquish all of the Sinai after the Suez Crisis of 1956, to Reagan's insistence on pushing through the sale of AWACs to Saudia Arabia, to George H W Bush dragging a reluctant Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid Conference in 1991 by threatening to cut off U.S. loan guarantees to Israel."

"The reason I bring up this historical background is that it shows that Republicans have a "realist conservative" position to fall back on now that Bush's neo-conservativism has become a fiery wreck. (And if you want to know what a realist conservative policy looks like in the Middle East, think of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper which - although smeared by the usual suspects as some kind of looney left Protocols of the Elders of Zion - reflects the basic premises of realist conservatism: 1. that Israel has a right to exist; 2. that Palestinians have a legitimate political grievance; 3. that the U.S. has interests in the Middle East far beyond Israel; and therefore 4. conflating U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East may be bad for Israel, but is certainly bad for the U.S. in that it destroys the prospect of normal relations with the Arab world). You can hardly say the same thing about a Democratic Party that is institutionally unable to utter a rational word about Israel. And this has the potential to really hurt the Democrats unless they can get their act together, open up debate, and come up with their own coherent foreign policy alternative to neoconservatism."